Case study: Alexandrina Council digitalises its wastewater system

Alexandrina Council in South Australia needed a better way to optimise its wastewater system, so they implemented artificial intelligence and machine learning to manage their processes.

Gary Lyons, manager, sustainable resources at Alexandrina Council spoke to Digital Nation on their journey to embed a new solution into their department.

As a process industry, Lyons said they are rich in data but they didn’t have the proper access to all that data.

“We didn't have any sort of platform in place, we're well behind what would be considered standard practice. From a risk perspective, a risk to the service, a risk to the business, it was imperative that we started to go down this journey,” he said.

“We were starting from scratch, so we had a good opportunity to look at what the market was doing at the moment. We actually started from a digital strategy point of view and how we would transform.”

Lyons said from that perspective, it gave them a good opportunity to look at the entire market, what was available in emerging technologies and future-proofing for that.

From implementing the SpiralData platform, they had a better understanding of how their systems operate.

Colin Shackleford, water project officer – process improvement at Alexandrina Council said SpiralData produced several dashboards for the council to see how their valves were operating in the vacuum systems.

“We'd inherited a system, which was a brownfield site, and there was no monitoring on that system. We had to roll out a monitoring platform first and there are 230 vacuum pits in the ground that we had to come to terms with on three vacuum stations,” he said.

The team needed to understand how those valves operated, SpiralData stepped in and produced dashboards to give the council better insights into those vacuum systems.

SpiralData’s system created a process where Alexandrina Council could test physical valves in the ground.

“Dale Cuthbert worked with SpiralData and a sound audio engineer, and went out testing valves to check the integrity without having to dig them up,” Shackleford explained.

“We did start to see some real benefits in tuning the valve systems. But that has been compromised by the fact that we have some leakages elsewhere, so finding those have been important.”

The dashboards also help the council identify some issues that residents were having with their water systems.

Dale Cuthbert, water operations and maintenance coordinator said the council has seen some customer benefits through monitoring residential water processes.

“We've had some customer benefits thereby checking the data and by monitoring that we can find leaks and save customers money on their water bills,” he said.

Shackleford added that these leaks were significant.

“One of the customers we estimated was losing about 15,000 litres of water a day through the system. That is the advantage that we weren't expecting from a customer perspective,” he said.

This new platform has meant the team at Alexandrina Council can quickly identify and fix issues within their wastewater system.

“We have established a working relationship that any problem can be addressed, packaged up and potentially solved,” Lyons said.

“When we start to look at infrastructure decisions, that's when you start to impact your customer in regards to the fact that if you can save unnecessary costs around infrastructure, you're potentially talking millions [of dollars].”